NYU Wireless’ Rappaport encouraged by US policy on 5G spectrum

One of the biggest proponents for unleashing millimeter wave spectrum in the U.S. said this week that he’s encouraged by what the FCC is doing – in fact, it’s exceeding even his expectations.

Ted Rappaport, IEEE fellow and founding director of NYU Wireless, along with a group of NYU Wireless students, authored the paper “Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work!” (PDF). The paper was published in May 2013, after which many vendors and operators started launching more millimeter wave experiments.

Rappaport told FierceWirelessTech this week that even he was surprised by the speed at which the FCC’s rulemaking is happening and the amount of spectrum they’re talking about releasing.

Earlier this week at the National Press Club, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the commission’s plan called for making a massive 14 gigahertz unlicensed band, which equates to 14,000 megahertz of unlicensed spectrum with the same type of flexible-use rules that prompted innovation in the past.

That represents much more than the amount of unlicensed spectrum that’s currently available. “That’s pretty amazing,” Rappaport said, applauding the aggressive tact the U.S. is taking.